By: demandprogress Friday February 25, 2011 12:08 pm
Skype, BlackBerry, and other Internet communications services are under attack. The Obama administration and the FBI are pushing legislation that would ban online communications technologies like these unless their developers make it easy for the government to wiretap them. Here’s a New York Times article on last week’s Congressional hearing on the topic.

The F.B.I. has been quietly laying the groundwork for years for a push to require Internet-based communications services — like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerry and Skype — to design their systems with a built-in way to comply with wiretap orders. On Thursday, the bureau made its first full airing of the “going dark” problem.